Description

This is a very cool and skinny spire in a very wonderful place. The climbing is a bit dicey. Pitch one;....climb up a slanting ramp with a crack . (5.9) Pitch 2; Climb 5.6 face and hop on a bolt ladder of various "things" bounded into drilled holes;...in the holes are bolts, pitons, and various hardware devices;....a hodgepodge of metal.There is a short crack section in this pitch;...then back to the bolts. Pitch 3; a whole pitch of (You guessed it...) more bolts. Pitch 4 starts with a 5.8 crack, which soon is A1, then a couple of bolts, then a section of really dicey soft/rotten rock ; this be the A4 section, I believe. The rappell from the summit was from a 6 mm cord rapped around the summit, backed up by a piton hammered into a hole......(Best bring some extra rope or a really really long sling to back this up. Rap from top to 3....three to 1, and one to ground.

Location

This is on the N. end of a formation W. of Round Rock...you can't miss it......you can see it for miles. At one point, it's skinnier in it's middle, than at the summit.....it's a trip.

I climbed this spire with Brian Povolny in Oct. 1982. We had both just moved to work and live on the Res;...I was itching to climb, and Brian had resolved himself that the climbing in the S W was crap, and he would just wait until he got back to the Pacific Northwest. Someone had told me of a climber who lived in Chinle, and I talked to Brian on the phone once. We agreed to climb together;..I picked this one for our first climb. I drove over to the base of the climb and waited for Brian to arrive and met him in person. I had only climbed one pitch on sandstone before, and Brian had not yet climbed on sandstone. Brian led pitch one, and placed a pin, which he tugged on and it pulled out; we were scared from the get-go. I led pitch 2 and a cold wind started to whip up. Brian led three and I got scared on some really bad rock on pitch 4. The anchor got us scared too. Being on this airy summit was fantastic;..it's got to be one of the finest summit anywhere;....very small, on top of , seemingly, the head of a pin......Brian didn't have as much warm clothes as me, and he was freezing; we were both wind-blown, and mentally cooked from this experience. We had fun, and did hundreds of climbs together over the years after this first one. The climb took us most of the day. This was a good one to start out with, for most others after that weren't so airy and scary in comparison.